If you want your Drupal website to work well on smartphones, tablets, and desktops, this practical guide shows you how to incorporate Responsive Web Design (RWD) with specific Drupal 7 themes. You’ll learn how to create attractive, easy-to-navigate layouts for everything from tiny phone screens to 30-inch desktop monitors—all with the same codebase.

Ideal for experienced Drupal developers, this book takes you through RWD basics and shows you how to build sites based on Aurora, Zen, and Omega—three popular base themes created by Drupal contributors. Whether you’re creating a new site with RWD or adapting an existing one, you’ll learn how to become a better, more efficient Drupal themer.

Understand how Responsive Web Design and CSS media queries work

Learn how the Sass stylesheet language and Compass framework support RWD

Adopt a mobile-first approach to RWD—and learn why it’s important

Get step-by-step instructions for creating custom subthemes on top of Aurora, Zen, and Omega

Tackle common problems when building and theming responsive Drupal sites

Mike Crittenden

Mike has been developing Drupal sites since the Drupal 5 days has worn many hats, such as lead developer, themer, and project manager. He prides himself in being just as comfortable with front end development as he is with custom module development. He’s worked with a wide range of clients, from Fortune 500 companies down to brochureware mom and pop sites.

The animal on the cover of Responsive Theming for Drupal is a scissor-tailed Nightjar (Hydropsalis torquata). Sometimes called the fork-tailed Nightjar, this South American bird is known for the males' elongated tail feathers, which can grow to be twice the size of their bodies. These brown, white, and black feathers are primarily used as display pieces during the mating season; females have short tails that contain no white. During courtship, the males and females find an open patch of ground, and while the females sit and watch the males open and close their wings rapidly and jump into the air. This causes the tail feathers to whip and snap around and demonstrates the male's agility and strength.

The range of the scissor-tailed Nightjar extends through many countries in South America, but is most concentrated in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru. They favor forests and woodlands or the cerrado, a kind of savannah with dense vegetation that is found in the more southerly parts of South America. Because they have such a large territory and fairly stable population numbers, this species of bird has been designated "Least Concern" by Birdlife International.

Females can grow up to 30cm long and weigh 70g; the males are slightly smaller. With a primary diet of insects, these birds are experts at snatching moths or beetles out of midair, but will also hunt close to the ground for bugs, ants, crickets, or grasshoppers.

Both sexes contribute to raising the young, but Nightjars do not build any form of nest or structure to protect the eggs, so defending them is an important job. The females lay the eggs directly on the ground and sit on them for 15 days. Males will spread their wings and jump at predators to discourage them, but the female and the clutch still remain vulnerable to attacks. After they are born, chicks stay with their parents for several weeks, and then the breeding pair splits up and will find new partners when the next season arrives.

Finally a great responsive theming resource for Drupal! The book begins with a brief overview of responsive and basic Drupal theming separately and then continues with how to add media queries to Drupal Themes and make them responsive. It covers some helpful tips for Sass and Compass - generating colors, creating sprites and creating mixins. The biggest value of the book is that it goes through how to create responsive themes from some of Drupal's most popular responsive base themes. A truly one of a kind resource for Drupal Responsive theming.

I think this would have been a great book had the author finished it. The topics are right on, but there is no depth. Themes and modules are introduced, but the tricks and, most importantly, the "gotchas" are missing. I hope someday there is a second revision that has the depth this topic deserves. Until then don't expect any more than a cursory overview.

I do not recomend this book, as theming it is related to design, this book seems to be writed only for hard coders an it is imposible to follow for a designer point of code. Get lost into seting up the enviroment, it takes for granted that every one knows how to install everything.